All Your Summer Songs

Possible ways to describe the music of Saturday Looks Good to Me, one of Detroit-based indie laureate Fred Thomas' approximately ...

Possible ways to describe the music of Saturday Looks Good to Me, one of Detroit-based indie laureate Fred Thomas' approximately 38 bands:

Scuffed-up transistor radio with a blown speaker beaming time-travelled frequencies from 1957-1967.

What The Beach Boys might have sounded like if they recorded in an underwater cove.

A warped vinyl copy of your favorite pop record played on one of those tan Fisher Price record players we all owned as kids.

If such descriptions set off the alarms of your festering indie-remorse, fear not. Though indie rock once defiantly waved the banner of lo-fi production, Slanted & Enchanted setting off a four-track reverse arms race over who could broadcast their music with the most slackitude and hiss-teria, I don't mean to trumpet that the budget sound of All Your Summer Songs makes it more "real" than a similar product of modern technology. Rather, I've come to the diplomatic conclusion that intentionally beat-up production simply complements bands who are bent on re-examining time-worn musical ideas.

Fred Thomas' Saturday Looks Good to Me is one of these bands, a large Michigan-based collective trying their hand at familiar oldies-station molds: walls of sound with bricks of brass and stringed instruments, arpeggio-heavy prom themes, shy soul, and surf grooves with radio-friendly ambitions. All of these songs are filtered through enough layers of reverb and ambient noise (courtesy of knob-twiddling from Thomas and His Name Is Alive's Warn Defever) to sound like they're coming from the past-their-prime speakers of Dad's old station wagon, a process that, paradoxically, strips them of their nostalgia and lends them fresh personality.

Take "Meet Me by the Water" as a representative sample. Opening with snare hits that sound recorded from two rooms over and a wood block clack processed into liquidity, the song rides on piano and guitar parts that bleed reverb profusely, and stratospheric, echo chamber'd female vocals which lend an airy spaciousness that could handicap it for some as typical cassette indie-pop. At least, until the dead-sincere saxophone solo, the verse where the elements fly off and reassemble at random in dub fashion, and the warm electric blanket coda of Loveless-style guitar. All in less than 1/20th of an hour, radio standard time.

Different shades of these textures are evident throughout All Your Summer Songs, with distantly familiar drum tracks being manipulated into submission and orchestral ambitions being squeezed through a four-track to come out the other side in unexpected fashion. Brass, string sections, and buzzsaw guitar fight for elbow room through the galloping "Underwater Heartbeat" and "Alcohol", while irresistibly catchy sections fly by before you even realize it, never to return. "Ambulance", a song taken from the band's self-released debut, is recast here as a duet featuring Ted Leo working out his lower register over taut guitar and Comiskey Park organ.

Leo's not the only mild celebrity appearing on All Your Summer Songs; Thomas turns over the singing to a basement-show all-star cast including Tara Jane O'Neil and Ida's Karla Schickele. Given the microphone-swapping details and torch-song performances, it's easy to think of the album as an even more obscure version of Stephen Merritt's 6ths album showcases, albeit stripped of the synthesizers, showtunes, and (save the lackluster title track) creepy baritone. The liner notes, unfortunately, fail to offer beleaguered critics a key to connect the vocal dots, but I'll vouch that the women fare best: The wide-eyed vocals of "Caught" skim playfully over what sounds like my childhood church's handbell choir, and the twee breathiness of "Ultimate Stars" nests perfectly within the track's chamber take on the riff from Booker T's "Time Is Tight". The male chorus gets stuck with the ballad catalog, but Thomas himself (I think) makes showstopping, cracked performances of the starry slow-dance numbers "The Sun Doesn't Want to Shine" and "Last Hour".

So while the album lags somewhat in the middle ("Typing" is a little bit Belle, a little bit Sebastian), All Your Summer Songs is unshakeable and unique enough overall to be the frontrunner for Official Rob Mitchum Warm Weather Album '03. With enough melodic chops to keep the project from falling into a pit of esoteric experimental production, and enough studio inventiveness to prevent the record from being Brian Wilson Love Letter #3451, Saturday Looks Good to Me seem poised to spring from tape-trading in dusty Ann Arbor record shops to national semi-stardom on the label emo built. Yes, Michigan!